Reporting is the largest and fastest-growing component of the business intelligence (BI) market The business intelligence systems used in most companies have a wide sperm of user classes and needs. The majority of end-users are simply report consumers who need basic reports delivered on a regular basis either in bard-copy, or, increasingly, in the form of email. A smaller audience needs reports that deliver more inactivity and customization. The smallest group of end-users—often referred to as power users—need full interactivity, the ability to create custom or ad hoc reports and queries, and drill-through navigation.
There is an ongoing desire to streamline the creation, deployment, and modification of reports, and to provide report authors and others with tools that allow openness, flexibility, and scalability. Ideally one reporting solution for the entire enterprise would be usable by a variety of people and be available for use throughout an organization. IT must be able to offer the reporting capability to the various users without overwhelming its resources.
Modern business intelligence systems provide report writing and modification tools for both professional IT and business authors that help extend authoring to a broad audience. Using these tools, reports are easy to create by dragging and dropping report data elements.
With these traditional report authoring solutions, authors create and deploy the report users send them back for changes. In addition, most report writing applications follow a rigid linear format that forces users to use archaic methods like customer coding and duplication of files (one per language), if-then-else statements to modify the format per language, and over-lay text stings with if-then-else formatting options to hide all but one overlay. Also, producing reports in different languages can require the generation of a series of separate reports, or even one report that must later be translated. Few solutions address issues such flexible report creation, so that in most cases making even minor changes means recreating the entire report from scratch, or worse, recreating an entire report series. As a result, many organizations already have a reporting backlog. Producing multiple reports from data is inefficient for the end user, wasteful of the network bandwidth, and has poor overall performance.
Any enterprise-wide solution must be able to solve these issues, or wide deployment of reporting will swamp IT.
External solutions to this problem have been used, but these require separate managing, and there are consequent inefficiencies. One example is the BCA Publisher by XENON CONSULTING INC, more details of which are available in the document “All About the BCA Publisher: Who's sending your information”, also available here:    www.bonymaug.com/Presentations/9-10-02/About the BCA Publisher-DCP.ppt.